Simple dishes for feeding animals need to be manually refilled at frequent intervals and this may not always be possible or at least convenient for the caretakers of the animals. Pet owners, for example, may be away for a period of days or may be engaged in activities that can unexpectedly interfere with a regular feeding schedle.
One type of animal feeder which accomodates to such circumstances includes a dish and a feed container which extends upward from one edge of the dish. An opening at the bottom of the container is positioned to cause a gravity flow of new feed into the dish at more or less the rate that it is consumed by an animal. Such animal feeders are particularly suited for dispensing so called dry feed for cats, dogs or the like as such feeds are usually granular in form and readily flow out of the container when the underlying supporting feed granules are removed from the dish by the animal.
Prior feeders of this type tend to have an undesirably complicated construction and are also inherent bulky if proportioned to provide adequate feed storage capacity. Manufactured lots of such feeders must usually be stored for a period in warehouses, transported to pet stores or other retail outlets in trucks or the like and must then again be stocked in quantity at the retail outlet. The cost of each of these operations is adversely affected by the bulk of the feeders.
Such costs can be reduced by distributing the feeders in a disassembled or partially dissasembled form but prior constructions then impose an undesirably difficult assembly procedure on the purchaser. Depending on the particular construction, such assembly may variously be taxing, time consuming, require the use of one or more tools or may be readily subject to error.
Prior feeders of this type also tend to be susceptible to displacement and to spillage of the contents by the activities of the animal. Such feeders may also attract crawling insects and the problem can be particularly acute at feeders which are designed to go unattended for more than the usual period of time.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems discussed above.